We are deranged

Utdrag fra:http://www.metropolism.com/magazine/2006-no6/wij-zijn-gestoord/english

"We are deranged"

Markus Schinwald

 
Suddenly at the centre of a hype, Markus Schinwald (b. 1973) is not happy with all the attention his work is getting, which goes along with the interest in the essence of man, sex and passion that seems to be cropping up everywhere. This type of art, which nowadays he is sometimes associated with, he calls 'psycho-kitsch', while his own work is of a more conceptual nature. Time to set things right.
This year, Markus Schinwald’s automated marionettes were shown as part of the Don Quixote exhibition at Witte de With and at the Berlin Biennial. In his installations, photos and videos, the Salzburg-born artist regularly focuses attention on human beings with their fragile, manipulable physicality and their bottomless psychological depths. Schinwald often puts his characters at the mercy of contrived obsessions, and he does not shy away from autistic rituals or neurotic ticks. He works all the registers of the diverse intellectual heritage of Vienna, where he lives, with enthusiasm and precision, just as he unhesitatingly makes use of current crossovers between fashion, cinema and science fiction.
In the film Dictio pii (2001), seven characters make their way around an empty, rather shabby hotel. Their unintentional encounters remain strangely vague. Doors open, only for the figures to disappear into the next room. In a lift, an old man ceaselessly dusts off his clothes; one actor wears a jacket that has been converted into a straightjacket; an elderly woman wears a metal fixture on her shoulder as she moves through the puzzling scenarios. The curious protagonists appear isolated, but also linked in some unspecified way, although there is no conventional plot binding them together. The film consists of five individual sequences that can be freely combined. There is, then, no beginning or end – instead, a level of meaning is generated by the indefinable hotel setting and the fetishized outfits. The scenes are also linked via the soundtrack, which applies to all of the protagonists. This voice off slowly morphs from a deep male voice to that of a woman. The last sentence of the videos, which is spoken in lip-synch, is: ‘We are deranged’.

Christina Werner:

Do you use the voiceover as an experimental shifting of codes, or is it more a play on the enigmatic aura of the androgynous?

Markus Schinwald:

‘The voice in Dictio pii begins as a kind of inner monologue, making what is said valid for each of the characters we see, only the last sentence is spoken in lip-synch. It could be described as a breaking of the voice in reverse, beginning deep and ending high. With the morphing voice I wanted to underline that thought (or human existence in general) is not stable.’

Christina Werner:

... and as a way of destabilizing gender codes?

Markus Schinwald:

’Yes, but unlike the gender debate where genders are treated separately, I was interested precisely in not making this distinction and letting the voice pass smoothly from one to the other.’

(...)

Christina Werner:

Your distinctive mises-en-scène not only adapt motifs from psychoanalysis, they also associatively make links within cultural history, as well as referring to fashion, theatre and film. How do you operate in your artistic work with or across the dividing lines between disciplines?

Markus Schinwald:

’Probably like most people of my generation, my first cultural experiences were not with art but with other areas of cultural production. First one is interested in cinema, in music videos or in fashion, and an interest in art only comes much later. To exclude all that later on would be strange. If I am working on a dance production, for example, I don’t worry about dividing lines between different sytems. I don’t go beyond them, I’m afraid. I think that the “art system” doesn’t really have borders. Something becomes art when you find someone, if possible many people, who are prepared to treat this thing, this action, or whatever, as art. A claim is enough. Although that doesn’t mean that everything is equally good or interesting. But the system can be described in this way. Which is why this concept of dividing lines between systems has never got anyone very far in art. It would be better to speak of overlapping systems than about transgressing borders. But from my own experience, I know that attempts at overlapping are very demanding, because different fields are governed by different conventions, there are different historical developments, and works are treated differently.’
(....)

Markus Schinwald:

’A few years ago, I wondered why certain topics had slipped out of current art discourse, and why I could think of a hundred artists from the late nineties who had done work on urbanism and modernism, but only very few good works on sex, pathos or the theatre. Now, just a few years later, the canon has changed considerably, and I am often appalled at the psycho-kitsch that is sometimes dished up. Unfortunately, this is also a problem for me, as some of my works also fit in this category, although they were developed in quite a different way – I see them more as disguised conceptual art than as ghost train art.’